


And Be Built Anew

by quodthey



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Disturbing Content, Gen, Scarecrow's Fear Toxin (DCU), traumatised dick grayson, traumatised jason todd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-29 21:54:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18302636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quodthey/pseuds/quodthey
Summary: In which it is Halloween in Gotham, and the only person having fun is Scarecrow.





	And Be Built Anew

**Author's Note:**

> Or: in which the author takes part in a time-honored batcave server tradition. 
> 
> This work contains content some people may find **disturbing**. I am always willing to answer tumblr messages or emails asking for clarification or elaboration.

Halloween in Gotham always was a guaranteed laugh a minute, and that was before the Joker and the Scarecrow both escaped Arkham in a mass breakout. And then there were the reports that filled every one of them with joy: the explosion around Crime Alley, and one off the harbor, and a riot downtown, and all of that was less than ideal to put it lightly but nothing that put a hitch in their step until Oracle, voice forcefully calm said, “I can’t reach the Red Hood.” 

Hood, who had responded to the news of the outbreak with an upbeat, “Cool. Just give me five, I gotta check on something real quick.” 

Jason, who had increasingly taken to lurking around the city and the Cave with dark eyes and a darker mood, and a rapidly shortening temper, his low voice becoming more two-pack-a-day even as Bruce and Alfred frowned at the smell of smoke, and as the days bled into one another, recognisable only as one furious mess. 

The Scarecrow was loose in Gotham.

The _Joker_ was loose in Gotham. 

Dick sucked in a breath. “I’ll head for the Alley,” he said. He wasn’t normally one for prayer but right now he was mentally offering up everything he had to everyone he’d ever heard of. 

“We’ll take the harbor,” Tim said, volunteering Stephanie, who sighed and agreed. 

“Sewers, B?” Dick asked, and Bruce grunted. 

“Check in every half hour,” Bruce said, over the background noise of the orchestra of Gotham—bones breaking, people screaming, alarms wailing. 

Yeah. They were in for an absolute barrel of laughs. 

\--

The general consensus among their little community was that Gotham was experienced best from the highest points, when you could see where the grey melted into black and the buildings and billboards glowed eerily bright in fog and shadows, could feel the city carry you when you dived from rooftops and feel the chill in your bones, feel the tempo of the city increase as you moved from the lonely peaks of the skyscrapers to wicked alleys and riotous crowds. 

It was the solitude of the heights that Dick craved as he made his way through the city, just above the madding crowd and their hysterics.

Laughter drifted up from the streets, and the bony fingers of an old familiar chill crawled up his spine because he knew that laugh. Not the voice, but the desperation in the laugh—the unstoppable, irrepressible laughter. Just about everyone in Gotham would know that laugh, and by the way they were pushing and shoving to get out of the area, he could see that they did. People in this city might be more prone to putting on masks and costumes but they weren’t stupid. They knew what happened next. They had seen this before. 

Thing was, the thing to do was to get out as quickly as possible, and with everyone pushing and shoving and trying to get out, mindless to all but their own situation, then all that happened was that they stalled. They always stall. 

And then another person started laughing. High, breathless, endless. 

Dick moved faster.

“Joker Venom near Crime Alley,” he told Oracle, swinging to the next rooftop. “No sign of Hood yet. You think he’s playing hide and seek? He’d probably be good at it.” 

“You’re hilarious,” Oracle said blandly. “Find him—we really don’t need his type of justice on the streets right now.” 

“Yeah,” he said, coming to the edge of a building, gazing down at the warehouse. “I’m working on it.”

There was a hole in the roof. Not that it’s uncommon for dilapidated buildings to have holes in their roofs or anything, but: there was a hole in the roof. 

Really it would probably be more accurate to say that there was a ceiling around the hole because there was that little of it left, but that’s how Dick thought of it when he first saw the gaping wreck still crumbling bits of concrete and wood. 

He admired the wreckage for a moment, hands on his hips as he looked down at it, almost expecting Jason to come out at any second to present the destruction to the family like a cat dragging home a dead bird. “Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve found our boy.” 

“Get him out of there,” came Batman’s predictable order, and Dick rolled his eyes, because what else was he going to do? Sit down for some tea and cakes? 

But he followed the command and dropped onto the roof, close to where it seemed like a god had punched a fist through the glass and concrete and metal. It dropped through the next floor, too, a wider hole, more destruction, shattered wooden tables, bent and warped metal, machines knocked around—a bomb blast, he realised, a bomb and the epicentre was just below him. He picked up some rubble, felt the weight of it in his hand, and gently threw it down. A section of the floor gave way. A building on the verge of collapse. 

Jason was here. The Red Hood. _Jason_. Dick looked at the wreckage of the building, and could hear Bruce’s voice in his ear, and Dick had seen the death report and the after action report and the photos from the last major bomb he had been in. He had been smaller then. If he was here—if they found him here, would he still look small? 

He put the thought aside, because Jason wasn’t dead again, and they were going to get him and go back to the Cave and not think about the Joker. 

He tore his eyes away from the wreckage in the centre of the room, and the bottom of his stomach dropped as far as the hole in the floor, because there in the corner was a hard curve of red, familiar to him as his own mask. 

There was a crowbar near it. 

There was a crowbar near Jason’s mask and the Joker was out of prison, and Dick found himself suddenly existing about a foot outside his own body as he looked at it, and he couldn’t tell if it was rust or dried blood. He thought he knew which it was. He didn’t want to know which it was. 

He took another step toward it, but it was the wrong one, and his stomach lurched as he fell with no warning, arms windmilling to no avail. He landed hard on his back, winded and aching, and felt more than heard something tiny go _crunch_. “Genius,” Dick gasped to himself as he tried to remember how to breathe, and slowly rolled over, taking note of aches where there shouldn’t be, and stood. 

“Hood?” he called, but the only answer he got was quiet, distant snarls and bitten off curses. He took one cautious step forward toward the sheer drop, and then another less cautious when nothing happened. A safe path, for now. “Red Hood, you okay?” 

This floor was dark and gloomy, the only light from the moon, but you don’t get far working in the night without some sort of night vision, and Dick wasn’t raised to be a fool, and he didn’t need to move in closer to be able to use the thermal vision in his mask. 

And that was when he saw it: the heavy booted foot kicking uselessly at nothing, the body squirming and trying to reach a weapon, reach anything, but the only thing near him were rocks and slabs of fracturing concrete and steel too heavy for either of them to lift, even if they could use both hands and Jason couldn’t because Dick had developed tunnel vision and all he could see was Jason, lying on his back, with his hand trapped under a monstrously huge machine. 

Dick found within himself a new, previously undiscovered hatred for the hydraulic press. 

The old heavy machine—metal rusted beyond use, painted scratched and peeling, something that had likely been sitting in the corner for years, not used and not in anybody’s thoughts—had crashed to the ground, but he carefully dropped down, climbing over the uneven piles of rubble and machinery to get to where Jason lay, arms splayed and vulnerable underbelly on display even as he squirmed. 

“You never do anything by halves, do you?” he asked Jason. His voice trembled, and he ignored it just like Jason was ignoring him. 

Or _had_ been ignoring him, because now he had all of Jason’s attention, and all that helpless fury was directed at him. 

“No,” Jason hissed, white as a sheet. “No. You come near me and I’ll fucking kill you,” he promised, voice low and dark, like it never was when they were younger and made fun of Bruce’s Batman voice. He gripped a piece of rock so tightly his fingers were white, but his arm trembled and he couldn’t lift his hand, so Dick wasn’t especially worried about being brained tonight but he eyed the area around Jason for the weak spots like in the floor above. “I don’t know what they promised you but I promise you you’ll regret this, asshole. You stay there, _stay there, don’t come any closer, I swear to God_ —” 

There was a dart in the side of his neck, tiny and vicious and poisonous green. He’d seen those darts before. 

Idly, he decided that after this was all over, they were going to have to give Jason an award for Worst Luck Ever.

“Nightwing, report,” came Batman, voice echoing slightly—sewers, they’d said. Batman was in the sewers and someone had tried to blow Jason up again. Maybe the bad luck was a family trait. 

“Jason’s trapped,” Dick said absently. “And looks like he had a run in with Scarecrow, or Joker, or both, because why not?” 

“Names.” 

But he couldn’t care about that right now, eyes drawn back to that machine and how Jason’s arm vanished beneath it. If he tried to move it—

“It’s his hand, B,” Dick heard his mouth say. “It’s his hand. It’s crushed. It’s.” 

“Nightwing,” Batman said. “Breathe.” 

“His hand is crushed,” Dick said again, helpless. “There was—he’s stuck. I can’t get him out of there.” 

The rest of the line was silent, until Damian spoke up. “You have to remove him from there,” he said. “Cut it off.” 

“What? _What?_ ” Stephanie cried. “And I say again: _What?_ ” 

“Of course the little demon would suggest that,” Tim muttered to himself, repulsed.

Bruce said nothing, but Dick could hear him breathing heavily. 

Dick thought about Jason’s strong, roughened hands, and what it would be like—driving a blade into Jason’s skin and muscle and bone, and wiping up his hot blood and salty tears. There had been a fire when he was Robin, and he had been torn between fear and awe at the flames licking higher and higher into the dark sky, and they had worked hard to get as many people out as they could, and it was maybe a decade ago but some days all Dick could smell was burning flesh. 

He thought about cauterising his brother’s wounds in a warehouse, and gagged. 

“How bad.” 

“It’s—it’s bad.” 

A stuttering breath. None of them would ever mention it. 

“There’s got to be another way,” he said. “Isn’t there anyone nearby?” 

“No,” said Oracle, grim even through the voice distortion. “I could send a car but given the state of the city—” 

“He’s trying for the water, again,” Tim said. “Three different locations.” 

Dick closed his eyes. See no evil, hear no evil, but he couldn’t promise that he would do no evil tonight. “We’re on our own.” 

“Nightwing,” Batman said. Just that. Just his name. But he would gladly go the rest of his life without ever hearing his name said like that again, like everything good had been drained out of the world and his father was slowly dying. 

Jason moaned, and Dick choked. “Oh, God.”

\--

Dick had done a lot of things in his time, but tying his brother’s hand up so that he could cut the other off was almost certainly in his Top Ten Terrible Things.

“Come on, Jay,” he cajoled. 

“Get away from me,” Jason snarled. Beneath his half-broken mask, he looked almost wild. Feral. He still wore that second mask, and the sight of the white blank lenses staring at him dispassionately was worse than if Dick could see all the hate in the world in his face. “I’ll kill you, I’ll fucking kill you.” 

Dick would probably do worse than that if someone was getting ready to cut him up when he was wide awake. “Yeah, buddy,” he said. “I know.” 

When Jason was healed, Dick was going to give him a bat and stand still and just fucking take it. He’d deserve it. He looked at the Batarang in his hand and his flailing brother, white with terror and fighting off monsters Dick could only dream of. He deserved worse. 

“But, hey,” he said trying to sound cheerful. “Could always be worse, right?” 

He couldn’t see how, but it felt important to try. Jason, insensible to reality, bucked up.

“—claw your _face off_ —” he gasped, twisting and writhing. “Fuck you, don’t touch me, don’t _touch me!_ ”

Dick kneeled across his chest and felt for the latches of the mask. Jason’s face and dark hair beneath it were damp with sweat, and his breathing was harsh and uneven. “It’s okay,” he said. He ran a hand over Jason’s head. “It’ll be okay.” But Jason turned his head and snapped at Dick’s hand with his teeth, vicious in the way a hunted, wounded animal is, when all it knows is that it is far from safety. So Dick pulled back, helmet in hand, and let Jason think he was safe from danger and told himself that this was necessary. 

He had built up a small pile of shattered wood and papers and surrounded it with rubble. He had searched and searched, nausea and horror and fear building, as he realised that the last time he had used his suture kit it was three nights ago, after Tim had been stabbed (“Lightly,” he’d said to everyone who needed to know) and he hadn’t refilled it. He had no clean needles and no floss, and it had been his clotting agent and a couple of other tiny vials that were smashed and wasted. So here he was, in a warehouse with his brother trapped and drugged, a fire burning with his brother’s own mask heating on it, paint melting away in the heat. 

The Batarang was a weight as familiar to his hand as the curve of the trapeze. He considered where on Jason’s arm would be best to cut, and he never wanted to touch a Batarang again. 

“This is the right thing,” he said to himself. 

“If there was another way,” Batman said. “I would be there.” 

If there was another way, Dick would be on the other side of the city. 

The Batarang was cold and sharp in his hand, and he wondered what it felt like between two shoulder blades. 

When Dick thinks about it later, remembers it, dreams about it, this is what it looked like: Jason’s screams echoed in his ears and the blood was so red against paling skin. The Batarang cut so cleanly through the skin and bone that it wasn’t any effort at all, and he didn’t throw up on the wound even though his stomach tried to. 

Things he will try to forget, to varying degrees of success: the horrified way Jason writhed and shrieked when the metal hit his skin, and again when he had to work through the bone, and how it went on forever, an eternity of sawing through his arm. The heat of the metal in his hands nearly burning him, and the stench of burning meat. The howls—beyond agonised, unspeakably awful, echoing down the comms system, into the ears of everyone, and the silence from them as Dick worked and worked and worked. 

When he was finished, he could see the pink sky of dawn through that hole in the ceiling, and he carried an unconscious Jason out into the light.

\--

When the car got to them, they said nothing about it, just settled Jason in to the backseat, where he could be held between two others and nobody said anything about holding elbows that didn’t end in wrists. 

In the cave they moved him carefully onto the crisp white sheets of the bed, and stepped back as Alfred took over, and Dick saw the lines running into the arm, and the bandages being replaced, and the scars he was going to see in his dreams for the rest of his life, and he turned around, took exactly five steps, and finally vomited. 

There was a glass of water out of the corner of his eye. 

“Drink,” said Bruce. 

“I can’t,” he said, but Bruce pressed the cold glass into his hand and he drank it anyway. 

There was a hand on the back of his neck, rough skin and a gentle touch. “You did well.” 

“I cut him up. I _cut him up_.” He tried to shrug the hand off, because Bruce shouldn’t be able to tolerate touching someone who did that to one of his children but Bruce had ever been implacable and immovable when he wanted to be. 

“If there had been another way,” Bruce told him. “We would have found it. There wasn’t.” 

Dick closed his eyes. “He’ll never speak to me again.” 

“You don’t know that.” 

“If I cut off your hand, would you ever want me back in this house?” 

“If it had been me,” Bruce said slowly. “I would have given you the knife.” 

But Dick wouldn’t think about that so he pushed away, and made his way to the other side of the cave, so Jason could heal away from him. The computer loomed large over him as he leaned on the desk. 

“He asked about him,” Bruce said. He was staring at the computer, but the screen was blank. 

“Who?” 

“Crane,” he said. “When we found him. There were reports. That Red Hood was injured.” 

Bile rose up in Dick’s throat. “Yeah? Who said?” 

“It’s well known that the Red Hood has a vendetta against the Joker.” It would be something of a non sequitur for anyone else, but Dick lived a life of half sentences and numbered grunts and counted muscle quirks. “And that the Joker is possessive.” 

“A team up.” 

“A distraction.” He paused. “A game.” 

Dick imagined waking up and seeing a white bandage and an empty space where his arm should be. Imagined not being able to take hold of the trapeze he had nearly been born onto and swing through the air as he had his entire life, a life without handstands and brothers standing on his feet and cartwheels down halls, and relearning how to be—how to write, how to eat. 

“Interesting definition of game they’ve got,” he said. 

Bruce was still looking at that blank screen. “The water is clean and Jason will live.” He paused, then glanced at Dick from the corner of his eye. “You should rest.” 

Every time Dick blinked he saw—

“I can’t.” 

If he knew Bruce, then Bruce knew him, and Bruce had ever been aware of how the people in his house slept. Or didn’t sleep, as the case may be. “He won’t wake for a while.” 

He didn’t bother pretending he didn’t know what Bruce meant. “You staying, too?” 

Bruce met his eyes, and said nothing.

“Wake me before him,” he requested, and Bruce frowned slightly.

“He’ll forgive you,” he said but Dick shook his head. 

His mouth twisted, a bitter smile. He and Jason had been playing games lately. Just mindless video games, trying to kill each other, but it had been fun and they had laughed, and he couldn’t imagine himself ever wanting to play video games with someone who took a combat knife to his arm and sawed through his bones as he begged and pleaded for them not to. 

“I don’t think so.” His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. They had been so steady for so long and now they wouldn’t stop shaking. Bruce put one hand over Dick’s, and the trembling stopped. “He shouldn’t.” 

“He’s alive,” Bruce said, intently. “Everything else is secondary.”


End file.
